Humans.txt File

Humanstxt.org is, like the now really defunct, not just seeming defunct Catalyze usability site, not a joke.

It should be. But it isn't. The site blends two powerful traits dominant in web development.

First, renaming a very standard convention from off the web for no good reason: The Colophon. Next, using that pointless new term in the wrong way -- often the opposite of what the term implies. There's a serviceable term for humans.txt. It's called content.

In the olden days, there used to be something called a Read Me First file. That would seem to give human readers something analogous to robots.txt for humans.

For some topics where a couple of intro paragraphs are not enough, a ReadMeFirst page could be a way to get visitors up to speed on the relevant issues, without leaving the site for research.

Some sites have pages on, for instance, window treatments. They influence shoppers coming to the site just to get a window blind to consider a wider array of products than their initial task calls for. Optional, such pages are different than, say, the idea behind the splash page.

Only in Terminator movies and real life web design does the world go topsy-turvy like this.

I will take your word that this is not a joke.
Although it reads more like the result of university late night intoxicated philosophical 'problem' solving.

Thank you for reminding me of the colophon. I had grown accustomed to the About. Mea culpa.

Given the meta tag 'author', the DC.meta tag 'creator', the aforementioned 'About' page, and similar existing insecure, unverifiable, self-identifying methods for claiming responsibility for a page's, a site's content I wonder: do we really need to reinvent what we already have?

Or do we need to read, to comprehend, to critique, to question, to be human?

Well, you are the sort of person that takes the approach "why not, cannot do any harm and may do some good" and also run a WP site, then there is a plugin to manage this info through the CMS - http://wordpress.org...ins/humans-txt/

(I still think it is a daft idea, why not just have "standards" on what appears in about pages?)